1. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to SONET signals and, in particular to the termination and generation of physically and virtually concatenated signals.
2. Description of Related Art
The use of physical concatenation (also referred to as contiguous concatenation in Europe SDH and concatenation with respect to SONET) and virtual concatenation signals in data transport is well known to those skilled in the art.
Historically, those who design SONET receivers have provided separate logic blocks in their receivers to separately handle received physically and virtually concatenated signals. This solution is not desired as the receiver would include numerous logic gates (circuitry) and occupies significant silicon real estate. There would be an advantage if the amount of space needed on silicon to support both physically and virtually concatenated SONET signals could be reduced.
The present invention addresses the foregoing and other needs in the art.